29 october, 2022
Location:Av. Don Pedro de Mendoza 1555, La Boca (MUNAR)
ARTIST: Lulú Lobo
Curated by Gonzalo Maggi
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Intemperie presents: NEOLOGÍSTICA, a solo exhibition by Lulú Lobo, curated by Gonzalo Maggi.
A 300-square-meter industrial warehouse, with one of its sides open to the elements, hosts this site-specific exhibition. The works, stirred by unexpected gusts of wind, seem to challenge their materiality with each movement. They were conceived in the same space that now shakes them—a sculptural response to their surrounding environment.
NEOLOGISTICS (Gallery text)
It is evident that languages mutate over time. If we take a historical retrospective of any of
them, it is plausible to detect that changes occurred periodically and irregularly over the
years, decades, and, with more prominence, centuries. These changes naturally continue in
the present; sometimes they emerge in response to new expressive needs, and other times,
out of caprice. They can even manifest as morphological changes that allow for loanwords,
but generally, they operate as phenomena that are newly incorporated into a specific
situated context. However, as they move away from the unfamiliarity of the unprecedented,
they are recognized as qualities that seem inherent or self-existing, as if they had arisen by
spontaneous generation. The notion of their origin is lost, or it is completely unknown, even
if there is no awareness of it.
Like any language, Lulú's work is inseparable from the notion of time, as it approaches it in
multiple ways. For several years now, it has been possible to detect in her production a deep
exploration of temporality in various senses. Indeed, Lulú visits the past both through the
themes she chooses and in relation to the language of printmaking. However, and as a sign
of the times, it is possible to recognize in many practices of contemporary art a recurring
approach to this abstract and complex concept that inhabits the everyday lives of people in
a world governed by capitalism. Certainly, Lulú investigates specific aspects of printmaking
and its history, which is why she travels back and forth in time like an inter-spatial traveler,
exploring the past in constellation with the present, referring, on one hand, to graphic
images dating back to medieval times, but which are also currently represented on
breakfast tablecloths or on the tiles of floors and walls.
In this regard, the prints on sewing pattern paper —as units with physical properties and
autonomous significations— can symbolically transform into many things: bricks, scales, or
crystal-shaped pendalogues to achieve, together, another meaningful unit. Something like
fractals intervene in space and raise questions about their own conditions of existence.
Each print is different from the other, but together they compose a self-supporting
ornamental structure because the artwork itself is its own structure.
On the other hand, Lulú's prints seem to question the postulates of a world that strives to
erase the line of our vulnerability, as they take shape through their inscription on an
undulating material like paper, whose characteristics exacerbate the sense of fragility,
transparency, and lightness, but above all, ephemerality. At the same time, the question
arises regarding the emptiness that exists between them: are there missing images or do
they respond to the unrepresentable or unspeakable? The prints reveal but also conceal,
traversing a range that extends from the valorization of the everyday and the minimal to the
major discussions aroused by the classical disciplinary techniques of the arts
circumscribed in the present. In these types of processes, the arts discuss some of the
foundations that articulate possible discourses about the visible.
In this regard, Lulú insists emphatically on investigating semiotic and metalinguistic
aspects of printmaking from the enunciation, questioning the legacies of different
periods in its History. In this line, if we think about works like Envés or Zig Zag, Lulú
combats certain academic postulates of this practice in each of her decisions, bringing
to light her lunar, Martian, and warrior fire. Indeed, for Lulú, this dispute is the main
motivation (and obstinacy) to continue producing meaning from printmaking.
However, and with great eloquence, questioning also operates as a tribute to the
practice, which is nourished by the desire to continue in the fight.
Therefore, like an Amazon, Lulú problematizes and reflects on the conditions of
existence of printmaking, introducing a series of decisions, conceptual variations, and
techniques that point to different categories circumscribed within the field of
contemporary art. The giant and self-supporting panels manifest something of "the
installation" through a dialogue between construction processes and the space that
contains them. In fact, the neologism is not only associated with new concepts or
ways of approaching materials in the field of printmaking but also, and especially, with
the specific site as an exhibition device, the relationship with another spatiality when
producing, and the exchange with other people and projects in a new context. In this
line, "Neologística” [Neologistics] is pure present; its decisions are made minute by
minute, and its existence is ephemeral but also monumental. It is tension and
pleasure, a mantle of contradictions that harmoniously coexist as a way of life that is
sustained from within and outside the arts.
María Mines